Happy Birthday Bug!

Here is a sweet little Bug five years ago today (one day old!!):

And here he is yesterday at Ella's Deli celebrating his fifth trip around the sun (the big day was yesterday!). Grandpa D joined us for lunch at Ella's and cake and ice cream:

This is the little dude that made me a mommy and he has been sweet and funny and smart and challenging and spirited. He is still a real mama's boy (in a good way!). While he is generally
confident and out-going, he also needs to check in at the mommy-base frequently to keep his batteries charged. Needless to say, I'm crazy about this little dude. His cake this year was a bat:


Those are allegedly exclamation points after "Happy Birthday." I'm not sure why the icing suddenly quit cooperating at that point.

Legos were the clear favorite gift this year! He has been building away like crazy and having a blast. His other big birthday excitement is that we decided that five is old enough to start being responsible for a library card, so we signed him up on our Friday library trip. Bean was devastated that she didn't get one too. When I told her she would get hers when she is bigger, she offered to stand on her tippy-toes, but no dice. She probably is nearly as responsible as Bug, but Mama just doesn't want to keep track of four cards yet (I keep track of mine and Kitty Daddy's due dates on the computer now, so Bug's will be added to the keeping track). The scary part is that now we have the ability to have 300 books checked out at a time! Gulp. But I don't think we will be making any major changes to our borrowing patterns.

I am still furiously knitting away at the chain mail. My goal is to get the knitting done this week and sew it up at late night knit on Friday. It may be close as there was a wee setback. I have the front of the tunic done and only have a few rows left on the back, so that will be easy to get done. The hood has been a little more challenging. Each half of the hood has 92 rows of garter stitch with shaping. I got as far as row 85 and it looked NOTHING like the picture and I thought it was kind of wonky that the shaping was on even rows for the first 36 rows and on odd rows after row 50. If I used my imagination and kind of squinted at it, it seemed like having all the shaping on the even rows would make it look more like the picture, so I ripped back to row 34. I am back up to row 60, but that is a LOT of lost ground for stealth knitting, even though it goes quite fast when I have privacy! I will post my modifications when I make a FO post after Christmas!